Sic Itur Ad Astra
by LostinOblivion
Summary: Clyde Bruckman looked at her and told her she wouldn't die. Scully almost believed him. Character Deaths.


_This is my first X Files story in four or so years, just my take on hints dropped that Scully won't/can't die. Obviously, I don't own the show. Thank you for reading, and reviews are greatly appreciated. _

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_October 13, 2079

Clyde Brukman wasn't completely accurate in his prophecies.

Scully curled tighter against the heavy quilt, feeling more tired than she'd ever been in her life. Her mother had made the quilt for Mulder when she'd first returned from being on the run. Even though Scully returned alone, Maggie had handed her the quilt, knowing that eventually it would get to him. It did, and had been in Mulder's middle-of-nowhere hide-away ever since.

Scully relied on the comfort or that quilt, of that little hide-away, as she felt herself growing weaker. Her body's weakness, her increasing frailty, that's how she knew Bruckman had been wrong.

That, and Mulder hadn't died from asphyxiation. He'd come close though.

The day he almost died of asphyxiation, was the same day Scully had sent a maid to clean his home. It was a lucky decision, that poor cleaning woman arrived just as he'd started to choke. Flushed and quite possibly as embarrassed as Mulder was, the nice woman had promised not to mention the event to the 'Mrs". Mulder told Scully about it himself, insisting she'd had a psychic flash of some sort, or else how would she have know he needed help?

Only Mulder would suffer the embarrassment of explaining that situation, just so he could tell her she was psychic. She smiled at the thought of him. He'd died forty-two years ago in this same house, as she held him in her arms in this same bed.

It had been a very lonely four decades without him, even after Christopher came into her life. She'd considered naming him after his great grandfather, but Mulder would have done somersaults in his grave if she'd named the poor kid Fox.

There were times over the years, where she'd been sure Bruckman was completely wrong, and about to be proven so. Her cancer was one of those times, during their first few months on the run had been another, and all of December of 2012 which passed without an abnormal amount of UFO sightings, and then there had been every time she got her ass in a sling while working on an X file. Before her life had became a never-ending uber x file.

The first time she considered that he have been accurate was her fiftieth birthday. Mulder had held her face in his hands, his eyes sparkling with wonderment, and told her she still looked thirty. Initially, she took it to be him saying she was beautiful. Scully women aged pretty well, she didn't worry too much.

In the coming years, it grew harder to deny that she just wasn't aging. She was tiring, growing weary maybe, but not really aging. Her hair was still flaming red as ever. At fifty-six, a twenty-nine year-old resident new to the hospital asked her on a date, and gaped when she revealed her age. She started dying her hair grey after that, and had found that grey hair dye was nearly impossible to find.

At sixty-five, when she could no longer hide the lack of wrinkles and age spots, she left the hospital and society in general. She moved up to Mulder's little home, and hid away with him for the next ten years. His body gave out at seventy-five, after so many years of abuse, and he died of natural causes.

That moment when his eyes closed for the last time, and his pulse ceased had quickly become the scariest moment of her life. Her last human connection was gone, the only person who could have ever accepted what she was, without fear or horror, was dead. She was left completely alone, with no idea what she was, and no hope that she'd ever follow him to that next world.

She'd held him all night, until his body was cold and her tears dried up. She arranged for his burial next to his parents and sister, and invited their still living friends. She did her best to hide her face from them, and none questioned the eccentric habits of a grieving woman. Then Dana Scully died.

She became Katherine Luder, a woman who was nothing but a shadow. A ghost.

It was shortly after that, that Katherine began to look for William. It took a full year to find him, settled in his own life with a wife and three children. He was happy, ignorant to who he was, and that there were two people who'd missed him terribly for so many years. With nothing but time, Scully watched her son and grandchildren.

William's youngest child, Madelyn, caught her attention, and it was more than that the girl had her grandfather's eyes. Scully had watched William age older she herself had ever gotten, and followed Madelyn when she went off to college. She was there the night bright lights blared into the girl's dorm room and took her away. She was there the night that Maddie was left terrified and confused in the school's football field. Scully had wrapped a blanket around her, whispered soothing words, and escorted her back to her dorm. Then she disappeared back into the woodwork, leaving Maddie to wonder who was the woman who'd been so kind to her?

That night, Scully had had a dream, a dream that finally explained the mystery her mind had been struggling to piece together. She finally knew why.

She'd watched Madelyn over the next nine months, her guardian angel of sorts. Maddie found out she was pregnant, and she began to remember, but not memories people would accept. The young woman was convinced aliens had taken her, she was afraid they'd come back, and she was afraid both of and for her unborn child. Her family and friends thought she was crazy, that she might be schizophrenic. Maddie ran away.

When Maddie went into labor, Scully was watching and called 911. The baby was born in the shitty hotel the young woman had been living in, and Maddie died at the hospital. Her parents were called after the hospital identified her, but by then someone had come and stolen her son from the hospital nursery.

It was not the first time Scully had commit a federal crime.

She named him Christopher, for the patron saint of travelers, because she knew, when he grew up, he was in for one hell of a journey.

Through that dream, Scully knew that she and Mulder were never meant to stop the future that the consortium still engineered. They were meant to discover it, and delay it, but not stop it. Their progeny was supposed to stop it. Not their child, not William, but their great grandchild, Christopher. That was why Scully was offered motherhood twice, only to have it ripped away. To make her want it, to make her long for it like nothing else in her life.

That's why she hadn't died.

Christopher was special, and needed someone who could understand that raising him. Someone who could tell him about the history of his family, about his great grandfather and mother without painting them as crazy people. And finally, he needed a woman to love him and protect him as only a mother can, while at the same time grooming him to take over the fight for the future. That had been difficult, pushing him into a world that she new from personal experience, resulted in a lot of heartbreak.

To her continued surprise, Chris never thought she was crazy, and picked up the quest readily.

Looks were not the only thing Chris shared with his great grandfather, he'd also inherited Mulder's passion and charisma. The same charisma that had ensnared Scully eighty-six years ago, like a fly in a benign spider's web. They had sent a young, inexperienced agent down to that basement, and she didn't have shot in hell against that charm. The fly always came back for more. Not that she regretted any of it, that would mean regretting him, and their son.

Chris had already proved he had no trouble attracting women, he hadn't been without a girlfriend since junior high. Mulder would have been proud.

"Hey mom, how're you feeling?" The young man in question entered the room, with a cup of tea in his hands.

He set it on the nightstand beside the bed, and folded his lanky frame onto a chair, taking her hand. William had grown to look more like Bill, with the Scully red-hair and all, but Chris had Mulder's tussled brown hair, as well as his build. He had brown eyes though, like his grandmother.

"I'm fine," Scully answered automatically. She chuckled, how often had she said that to Mulder, and received that intense look that sent chills down her spine?

"Drink the tea, it'll keep you warm," Chris directed nudging it toward her.

Scully sat up slowly, and accepted the shawl Chris wrapped around her shoulders. She took the tea, and sipped while regarding him, the boy who called her 'Mom'.

"How about I tell you a story, like you used to do when I was sick?"

She smiled patiently at him. "Christopher, I need to know that you understand what's happening to me."

Four days ago, she'd watched proudly as Chris walked across a stage, shook some man's had, and officially received his medical degree. He was Dr. Christopher Luder now. Chris went out to celebrate with his friends, and she'd gone back to their little house like it was any other day and slept like it was any other night. But everything changed when she woke up the next morning.

She found grey hair. Not just a grey strand here or there, or even greying roots. The flames of her hair were being smothered by grey, the once vibrant dulling by the minute. Her heart had fluttered at the sight, and continued fluttering excitedly as she backed a bag and got on a plane. Before boarding, she'd called Christopher, and told him that she was going back to his great grandfather's rural home. He promised to be there the next day. By the time he saw her, her hair was silver, her skin wrinkled and spotted, and her body very tired.

Now Chris nodded, and looked at the ground. "It's not fair."

"Chris come on, you know I've lived an extraordinarily long life. It's plenty fair."

"Not with me," he insisted, his head coming up quickly.

"That may be so, but in an ordinary world, my time should have run out long ago. You'd have never known me."

"Yes, but in this world it didn't. In this world, you're my mother, whatever else you may be, and I should have more time with you." He'd gone back to looking at his hands, avoiding looking at her.

Scully took one of his hands in her small fragile ones, prompting him to look at her. "You are pursuing your own life now, Chris. You are going to start an internship, you'll become a wonderful doctor, and you'll meet a woman--" She stopped to take a sip of tea for her tired voice.

Chris smiled and finished her sentence for her, "that'll run around with me chasing aliens, like you did with great-grandpa?"

"Well, I don't know if you'll find a woman with that kind of patience, but if that's what you're looking for, good luck to you." She joked.

He laughed his head falling toward the ground, but when he picked his head back up, his smile was gone. "I went to the cemetery like you asked. They said there's no room in the Mulder plot, but they have a space a few rows down."

"Then have them stack the coffins, I know they do that." She finished the cup of tea, an set it back on the coaster.

"I asked about that, he said he already has them stacked."

Scully sighed. "Then just throw me in the damn coffin with him. That's where I want to be buried."

Chris chuckled. "You make it sound so delicate, mom."

"Christopher, I have learned that there is nothing to fear from death, especially not when you've been alive as long as I have."

"Alright, alright, I'll see what I can do." He squeezed her hand. "How about I tell you that story now?"

Scully nodded, and slid back down under the covers, snuggling up to the quilt her mother had made so long ago.

"So, do you want to hear the one about the lake monster, the mothmen, or the werewolf?"

"Oh god, none of the above. You want to lull me to sleep with stories about monsters?" She screwed her face up in distaste.

"It worked for me when you told them," Chris laughed.

"You didn't live them, and I'm still not sure why didn't have nightmares from them, by the way."

"Well, you and great grandpa always survived, and usually stopped it. I knew if I ever ran into a monster, I had a mom who could kick it's ass."

Scully chuckled. "I suppose that is rather comforting for a kid, but my monster fighting days have long been over."

"Alright, so what story would you like to hear?"

"Tell me about med school. It's been a long time since I was in med school, I can barely remember it."

"Alright, I'll tell you about body they got at school with the weird fungus," he offered.

Scully eyebrows rose. "Fungus? That's your idea of a bedtime story? God, what did I do to you?"

"No, no, it was really cool, mom!" He insisted excitedly, launching into the story of he and two classmates hearing about the body, and then breaking into the cadaver room at two o'clock in the morning so they could study the fungus for themselves. They were miraculously not caught.

Scully barely kept her eyes open for the whole story, drifting off almost as soon as he finished. She dreamt about two close friends examining a corpse, and debating how a young black man could have been rendered albino-white. It wasn't her first dream about the x files, but she realized when she woke tiredly to the still dark night, it would be her last.

Bruckman was going to be proven wrong tonight.

She allowed her eyes to travel around the room, getting one last look at the place, her eyes settling on her son's sleeping figure. He'd fallen asleep in that chair, as if his presence in the room could prevent her death. Her eyes grew heavy as she watched, and Scully knew her time had finally come.

Exhaustion drew her eyes shut for the last time, and one word, whispered on familiar lips drew her over into the other side. "Scully."

"I told you there was no such thing as psychic ability, Mulder," she said.

He sighed. "Scully..."

***

_Sic Itur Ad Astra: Thus you go to the stars..._


End file.
